The guide enables countries to measure the costs associated with retail payment instruments, based on survey data, for the payment end users, payment service/infrastructure providers, and the total economy. The guide also enables countries to derive projected savings in shifting from the more costly to the less costly payment instruments.

A World Bank Group team set out to answer the questions: Who are Moroccan green entrepreneurs, and what is the entrepreneurial landscape they operate in? They found that:

Almost half of surveyed Moroccan green entrepreneur businesses are solo-run.

84 percent of surveyed entrepreneurs were self-funded at the early-stages.

54 percent of entrepreneurs identified a lack of access to market information as the biggest barrier to doing business in Morocco.

Those are just a few findings from their work on the first World Bank Group climate entrepreneurship ecosystem diagnostic in Morocco, a deep dive into the North African nation’s green start-up ecosystem.

The diagnostic, surveying more than 300 entrepreneurs and industry players, shines unprecedented insight into multiple facets of Morocco’s climate entrepreneurship ecosystem, and how different political, financial, and cultural forces play out to drive the sector.

In a highly visual format, a new report explores the top findings from the diagnostic, bolstering them with case studies, key facts, and graphics. The report uncovers interesting clues to Morocco’s strengths and challenges: Typical Moroccan green entrepreneurs are young, educated, and started their businesses because they wanted to be their own boss. These entrepreneurs work in diverse sectors — from green information technology to energy efficiency — and are creating and adapting technologies and solutions to solve some of Morocco’s greatest environmental challenges.

Never in recent history has anti-minorities rhetoric — anti-immigrants, anti-religious-minorities, anti-LGBTI — been so pronounced in so many countries around the world. Those groups, we are told, are the cause of our current economic crisis because they steal our jobs, fuel criminality and threaten our traditional way of living. And yet, the causes of our economic crisis are probably more nuanced, and initial research seems to suggest that more and not less social inclusion will help us overcome the instability of our times.

The exclusion of minorities from the labor force is becoming politically and economically unsustainable for many states that are struggling to retain their legitimacy and strengthen their competitive potential in an increasingly global marketplace. As a consequence, governments, international development agencies and academic institutions are now looking seriously at ways to develop policies that guarantee a more equal and sustainable form of economic development — development that addresses both short- and long-term economic goals.

The World Bank’s Equality Project attempts to address this problem. The idea driving the project is that institutional measures that hamper the access of ethnic, religious and sexual minorities to the labor market and financial systems (such as legal and policy restrictions, or the absence of appropriate, positive nondiscrimination actions) directly affect their economic performance and, as a consequence, represent a cost for the economy: If a sizeable percentage of the population is not given the opportunity to acquire a high-quality education, a good job, secure housing, access to services, equal representation in decision-making institutions and protection from violence, human capital will be wasted, income inequality will grow and social unrest will ensue. The World Bank’s widely cited Inclusion Matters report puts it succinctly: “Social inclusion matters because exclusion is too costly. These costs are social, economic and political, and are often interrelated.”

The project collected and validated data on the legal framework of six pilot countries: Bulgaria, Mexico, Morocco, the Netherlands, Tanzania and Vietnam. The methodological approach of collecting cross-country comparable data according to key indicators yielded some general but interesting results, published in a research working paper in March 2017.

In late 2014, the World Bank’s Competitive Cities team visited the Moroccan city of Tangier, to carry out a case study of how a city in the Middle East & North Africa Region managed to achieve stellar economic growth and create jobs for its rising population, especially given that it is not endowed with oil or natural gas reserves like many others in the region.

In just over a decade, this ancient port city went from dormant to dominant. Between 2005 and 2012, for example, Tangier created new jobs three times as fast as Morocco as a whole (employment growth averaged 2.7% and 0.9% per year, respectively), while also outpacing national GDP growth by about a tenth. Today, the city and its surrounding region of Tanger-Tétouan is a booming commercial gateway and manufacturing hub, with one of Africa’s largest seaports and automotive factories, producing some 400,000 vehicles per year (with Moroccan-made content at approximately 35-40%, and a target to increase that share to 60% in the next few years). The metropolitan area now boasts multiple free trade zones and industrial parks, while also thriving as a tourist destination. As in our previous city case studies, we wanted to know what (and who) drove this transformation, and how exactly it was achieved.

A new global network of Climate Innovation Centers will support the most innovative private-sector solutions for climate change.

Pop quiz: What does an organic leather wallet have in common with a cookstove for making flatbread and a pile of recycled concrete?

Believe it or not, each of these represents something revolutionary: a private sector-driven approach to climate change. Each of these products – yes, even concrete – is produced by an innovative clean-tech company. And as of March 26th, those businesses, and hundreds more like them, have something else in common. They’re connected through infoDev's newly established global network of Climate Innovation Centers (CICs), an innovative project that is taking the idea of green innovation beyond borders.

Having piloted the CIC model in seven different countries – Kenya, South Africa, the Caribbean, Ethiopia, Morocco, Ghana and Vietnam – it was time for infoDev, a global entrepreneurship program in the World Bank Group’s Trade and Competitiveness Global Practice, to follow a time-honored business practice: to scale up and take this movement global.

And so, as part of last month’s South Africa Climate Innovation Conference, we joined forces with 14 experts from the seven different countries where the CICs operate to establish the foundations of the world’s first global network devoted to supporting green growth and clean-tech innovation.

CIC staff debate and discuss the new CIC Network during the South Africa Climate Innovation Conference.

This global network of Climate Innovation Centers – business incubators for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) – has been designed to help local ventures take full advantage of the fast-growing clean-technology market. The infoDev study “Building Competitive Green Industries” estimates that over the next decade $6.4 trillion will be invested in clean technologies in developing countries. An even more promising fact is that, out of this amount, about $1.6 trillion represents future business opportunities for SMEs, which are important drivers of job creation and competitiveness in the clean-tech space.

In the old times, the post office was the main connector between cities and villages, moving letters and money to every corner of the country, and contributing towards the territorial consolidation of states under construction.

Nowadays in developing countries, the post office is often seen as an old, inefficient, deficit-making, and outdated public service which has not been able to keep up with the evolving markets. It takes some imagination to see the post office as a potential engine for economic growth and social inclusion.

In light of recent political and social unrest in the region, foreign investors are taking a “wait-and-see” attitude to projects in the Middle East and North Africa. For the region’s investment promoters, this demands better, more proactive performance than in the past. Fortunately, although much remains to be done, the investment agencies of the 19 MENA governments are, as a group, off to a good start, according to a World Bank Group report released today.